Talk Of Kandahar's Surrender Fails To Halt Fighting

AMERICA: ATTACKING TERRORISM

QUETTA, Pakistan -- A senior member of the Taliban government consulted with Afghan community leaders here Saturday in what was described as part of a broad-based initiative to negotiate the surrender of the Taliban's spiritual capital of Kandahar.

The Taliban representative, who declined to be identified by name, was interviewed shortly after his arrival from Afghanistan at the home of a prominent Afghan figure in Quetta.

He said efforts to surrender the city without a fight had been launched at a secret meeting Monday in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. About 65 prominent figures -- including Soviet-era commanders, southern tribal elders and more than 20 disillusioned Taliban members -- attended the session, he said.

The official said the participants had decided that it was time to surrender the city because the entire Taliban movement had been taken over by a series of corrosive outside forces, including an international drug mob, international terrorists, the puritanical Wahabi school of Sunni Islam and Pakistani intelligence.

"These four groups hijacked our movement," said the official, whose anonymity was required because he was still a member of the Taliban government. He also said he would be detained by Pakistani authorities if his mission were known.

Evidence of a stepped-up search for a negotiated end to Taliban rule in Afghanistan's second-largest city came amid reports that forces operating under two ethnic Pashtun tribal chiefs had launched an offensive against Taliban units between Kandahar and the southern border town of Spinboldak.

Hundreds of fighters loyal to influential Pashtun tribal chief Hamid Karzai and another force under a former Soviet-era commander and former Kandahar governor, Gul Aga Shirzai, were engaged in heavy fighting against Taliban forces along the main road that connects Kandahar with its southern hinterland, Karzai's brother, Ahmed, said early Saturday.

The attack marked the first significant ground action against the Taliban anywhere close to Kandahar, one of the movement's last major strongholds as well as home to its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Together with the contacts under way to negotiate the city's peaceful hand-over, the developments are further indications that the Taliban's rule of Afghanistan seems to be entering its final phase.